by Sue Grafton
Her mother’s cigarette went out, but the hand remained, resting on the edge of the table, poised while her mother drifted into sleep. Her breathing slowed until Kit, watching, wondered if she were dead. Often she sat and stared at her mother that way, wondering if she would die like that, on the couch in the cool of the day. Maybe alcoholics died from never waking up or died from lying down too long. Kit hated her with a kind of resignation, patience, servitude. Kit sat with her mother, talked to her, fixed toast for her or a cup of tea, and all the while, she felt like some ancient doctor with a dying thing, a zombie lady or a skeleton. How could she love what was not even alive?
Kit had seen other mothers in the world. She had seen women who were sober all day long, bright-eyed and talkative, who dressed up in high-heeled shoes and went to country clubs, who cleaned their houses, cooked meals, drank coffee in the afternoons and laughed, women who joined the PTA and took their daughters to department stores to buy them bras. Kit’s mother could hardly go anywhere. She drove the car from time to time, a black 1940 Oldsmobile with Hydra-Matic drive, perched on a cushion and even so, not tall enough to see with ease. Her mother drove slowly, hugging the right side of the street and sometimes Kit caught her breath at how close her mother came to skinning parked cars. Her mother ordered groceries from the corner store, ordered liquor from the drugstore four blocks down and in that manner managed to live most of her life in the living room, stretched out on the couch. In the kitchen, colored women would iron for hours and in the yard, the grass was mowed by colored men. And all the time, Vanessa lay there, saying nothing, moving not at all except to smoke. What went on inside that head? What could her mother think of hour after hour, day after day? Kit could remember that her mother had once played the piano and when she was angry, she’d sit there pounding the keys, the thunderous chords announcing her displeasure to the rooms upstairs. What was the woman angry about? In those days, they had at least known, that she felt something. Now, no one was sure. The anger had been sealed off and burned in silence now: frustration, defeat, whatever it was she felt. Kit had seen that veil come down across her mother’s face. When she was angry now, she just withdrew, her facial expression fading, lids coming down to shield those telling eyes. No one would know if there was pain or tears. She was like a secretive child, stealing away to a world she had locked up inside, like an animal nibbling from some secret store. It was hard to love a lady who couldn’t cry. It made Kit feel too much power, too little care. Kit wept bitterly, scalded at times by the loathing that welled up like tears. There were times too when she felt a great rush of pity, of shame and love and regret. Whatever else she was, Vanessa was the only mother Kit had, the only place Kit knew that was really home, however silent, tortured, and chill.
Sometimes Vanessa’s condition deteriorated to the level of disease and then an ambulance came, attendants lifting her mother from the couch to the stretcher, wheeling her out to the street, where the neighbors would stand, full of sympathy. They liked her mother, who in her better days had been their friend, who’d listened to their aging ills when she called them up on the phone. Now in silence they watched her ride away and they would question Kit afterward about how Vanessa was getting along. Within a week or ten days she’d be home, that miraculous change having taken place. Vanessa would be back on her feet, exuberant, energetic, and gay, and each time, Kit’s heart would fill with hope. Vanessa would plan the meals, would chat in the kitchen with Jessie or Della while they ironed, would supervise the black men in the yard, make cheery phone calls to everyone. Maybe they’d go out to dinner again on Sunday nights, the four of them, Vanessa and Daddy, Kit and her older sister, Del. Maybe they’d go to some basketball games or to Holiday on Ice or maybe they’d walk to the drugstore at night to buy comic books. The burden would lift and the world would puff up like a colored balloon and even though it wasn’t perfect, it would be all right.
And then she would see it again in her mother’s face, the first signs of defeat, the faint slur, exaggerated walk, the little silent trips to the pantry, where the bourbon bottles were. Vanessa would sink back down to her day-long dream and Kit, when the time came, would sit in her mother’s chair, keeping that vigil of hate and hope, wishing her mother would die or that she’d go down again far enough so that someone would come and take her away and make her right. Kit had seen it there, the evidence of the woman who was, the light in the round face, quick bright eyes, something nervous and splendid pouring out of that body from her very bones. This was a woman capable of anything, the woman who had been Kit’s perfect mother once but was no more. This was the woman whose life was failing her right before their eyes, whose year was made up of secret cycles which lifted her first and plunged her down again, full circle, beginning, middle, and end. And each time she rose and each time went down again until she could rise no more. And Kit sat in her mother’s rocking chair, caught up in a cycle of her own, of love, of pity, of hate. And she knew that her mother was lost and strong and she knew that somewhere the thunder rang from chords still sounding inside. But how would this woman ever be free and how would she let Kit go? How would any of them be whole again when they’d gone down together so often into that little death?
that’s not an easy way to go
Later in my life when I’m asked what happened to her, I think I’ll just say, “Well, we don’t know exactly what it was. She may have fallen into enemy hands. From the look of her, she was tortured to death, and that’s not an easy way to go.”
SHE STANDS AT the foot of the stairs, one hand on the bannister, swaying slightly, smelling of cigarettes and Early Times and Wrigley’s chewing gum. She has fallen near the telephone stand in the front hall and her left arm is now cradled painfully against her waist. Jessie stands on one side of her and I stand on the other and together we pull a pale blue dress over her pale brown hair, easing it gently down over the injured arm.
“Does that feel all right?” I say to her, buttoning the front of the dress to support her arm.
“Sure,” she says. “It doesn’t bother me at all.”
THERE ARE QUESTIONS I could ask her, but I don’t. I could ask, for instance, how many jiggers of Early Times she managed to drink while she stood in the pantry pretending to open a carton of cigarettes, but she would say “none” and then I would have the lie to accept or refute and at the moment, it doesn’t seem that important. I know and she knows that she is drunk—though “drunk” of course is not the proper word to describe the condition she’s in. She is simply beyond her tolerance for alcohol, a tolerance which has never been great because she is, herself, a tiny person, barely five feet tall, weighing not even a hundred pounds. If you took a delicate ten-year-old child and gave her even a sample of fine bourbon, the result would be the same, except that the child would not know enough, perhaps, to pretend otherwise.
My mother pretends that there is no pain when I know and she knows that we will shortly discover a hairline fracture near her left shoulder. At the moment, I don’t even worry about the drive to the hospital or the X-ray or the doctor’s confirmation. I worry about the buttons on her dress and the knee-length stockings which are rolled down around her frail ankles and the shoes which are fifteen years out of style. We dress her, Jessie and I, saying nothing much and I am thinking as I smooth her fine pale hair back into the hairpins that I am, in fact, being a mother to my mother. I am nineteen and I am remembering the years—two years? three?—that I have been changing places with her: taking her to the doctor’s office, buying her clothes, helping her up to bed, giving her long, self-righteous lectures about her “drinking problem,” which I had decided, at the age of fifteen, needed to be brought out in the open and dispensed with once and for all. For three years I have been lecturing to her in this manner, sitting in the living room in her small gray rocker, rocking as I speak, and for three years she has been lying there on the couch, her eyes closed, a lighted cigarette in her fingers, saying nothing. From time to time, I have extracted weight
y promises from her, promises which she seems utterly incapable of keeping especially in the light of her constant denials of any such problem at all. The contradictions are apparent but we choose, both of us, to ignore them so that we can get on with the business at hand.
I have given up praying for her. I have given up even praying for myself and I’ve taken instead to pouring hidden bottles of bourbon down the bathroom sink and filling the bottles up with tepid tea. This is insidious, of course, because she discovers the ruse almost at once but cannot admit it or acknowledge it, cannot even defend the loss of so much expensive whiskey into the sewer systems of the world. And so we continue, this woman and I, she feigning sleep, I intoning almost without conviction the terrible price she will have to pay for her secret sins.
In the moment that I discover that I’m the mother to my mother, dressing her there at the foot of the stairs, I feel both a sense of loss and resentment. It’s as though in the very act of perceiving this, I have given something away which I will never be able to retrieve. And at the same time, I know that whatever it is I’ve lost—whether innocence or childhood or a simple illusion about the nature of our relationship—whatever the loss, it’s something I gave away a long time ago, something I’ve merely retained by default for some years.
I look at her closely: small round face, faded blue eyes, a shade of lipstick (far too dark for her fair coloring), fragile skeleton, faintly fleshed out into the form of a woman, aging and underfed. We have conversations, this woman and I, about what she’s eaten in any given day which is never much. A piece of toast, she says, or soda crackers broken up in a glass of milk. She’s burning up bourbon and she has no need for food. Her bewildered body shrinks away from her, failing, failing, surrendering up to malnutrition, pneumonia, some grief in her bones. From this pale remnant of a person, I can work backward in my mind to a time when she was nineteen, too. There’s a picture of her taken at Virginia Beach that year. She’s standing on the other side of a pair of swinging doors, her legs visible beneath, her arms resting along the top. The face is the same, small and round, and her hair is pale. She wears it in long thin braids wrapped around her head in fine ropes. She is very tanned and her smile is broad and free, her legs very shapely and firm. She remembers this time as a good time in her life and she returns to it in her talking, rambling talk, as out of fashion as her shoes. I have no notion in the world what has happened to her between that time and this; only that some battle must have raged somewhere to take such a toll from that once sturdy frame.
I know, as a matter of course and without dismay, that she’s attempted suicide twice but she seems to be insincere in this and no one pays much attention. She might drink. She might smoke forty cigarettes a day, eat little, scarcely stir from the place where she lies all day long in the long dream of her life, but we cannot seem to understand among us that she has no use for her life, lives with no joy at all, suffers some secret silent anguish which is draining away, drop by drop, any reason of hers to go on. She is simply with us and our collective acceptance of this fact will have to serve as her motive for life. She is living because she hasn’t yet managed to die. She has come one step closer now. She has fallen again, her body announcing with a faint snap that it cannot go on much longer under the regimen of abuse and deprivation which she has imposed upon it. She is winning a fifteen-year battle and she knows it. Only the rest of us are not yet informed. We can see the evidence but the sight has been before us for so long that we no longer register pity or amazement or despair. I will understand in a year, or maybe five, that she is one of the loneliest women in the world, this mother, but for now there is only this job to be done, the dressing of her brittle body so that we may take it to the body mender to be fixed—bandaged and glued and wrapped all around with gauze and adhesive tape. She suffers this to be done though it seems to matter little to her. We insist that she go on living, so she does, but only until the moment when she can outwit us—which she will—soon—in her way.
In the meantime, she is ready and I help her out to the car. I forget now what we talk about because it doesn’t matter much. She knows and I know that we will never get around to the conversation we should really have and probably neither of us will ever understand just why that is so. I take her to Norton’s Infirmary, to the parking lot around in back where I always park when she’s been hospitalized, usually twice a year. The sun is shining though it’s bitterly cold and I walk with her up the emergency ramp, down the broad corridor with its mottled marble floor polished to a soft gleam, to the elevator with its doors which shush us in and shush us out again on the fifth floor, X-ray department.
Dr. Belton has called in advance and they take her in to be X-rayed, she denying any pain, denying even the existence of her own soul if she could. The X-ray will show it. One soul, sadly cracked in a way that no one can mend. Perhaps the doctor will prescribe lots of alcohol, who knows? I sit in the hallway and smoke and stare out at the window, where the branches of the trees are bitter and bare. Later in my life, though I know nothing of it now, I will like hospitals. They will seem familiar to me, a little like my mother, who has lived so many disconnected fragments under doctors’ care. Hospitals will always seem a little like the holiday they were when I was young and she went in and my sister Del and I were at home, free for a little while of the burden of caring for her. Hours and hours of my life have been spent in hospital corridors. Hours and hours of my life have been spent waiting for her to come home.
After a day or two in the hospital, the difference in her is remarkable. Sober, she is cheerful, as bright as a bird, roaming up and down the hall, into other patients’ rooms, where she visits with them. The nurses joke with her, hide in her room to smoke. She is a favorite on the floor and when she leaves, they gather around her and wish her luck, kiss her cheek, and bundle her warmly into her coat. And when she comes home again, she begins to drink almost at once. Now and then to frighten her into good behavior, we threaten to commit her to an institution—the doctors, my father, and I. I think now we should really have done that, for her sake. She might have found protection there, some peace, some sense of purpose in an otherwise pointless life. Instead, ironically, she stays at home and suffers whatever it is she suffers: boredom, frustration, loneliness, defeat, the worst diseases of mankind and she with some inherited tendency for each.
We put her in. They fix her up and then we take her home again and none of us understand what she’s dying of, what’s killing her one-two-three. It’s us. It’s me. It’s Del, my father, and that house. It’s time; the past that looms up like a phantom, the future rising up like a blank bare wall. She is a haunted lady whom nobody will abandon. We stick by her. Loyal. True. And we are killing her with our misdirected virtues, the apparitions of love instead of its flesh and blood. We are weighing her down with our devotion and we cannot let her go. We will discover later, though we never admit it among us, that it was she holding us together in her way. And I will know much later that I loved her. And I’ll know much later that she loved me, too.
For the moment, I am sitting in this corridor, staring out at the bitter trees beyond, while the medics declare her broken again and set about to mending her with plaster and dry sticks. How will I tell her, driving home again, what has broken in me and how will I make her understand that in the scheme of things, it is she who was meant to mother me and I meant to receive?
lost people
IN THE PANTRY, there was a wide shelf of mahogany which smelled perpetually of bourbon. Above it was a cabinet where the china plates were kept, cups and saucers, glasses, bowls, and serving pieces. There were two drawers filled with cocktail napkins, sticky swizzle sticks, corkscrews, pencils and a strange array of coasters, matches, chewing gum, and string. My mother drank her bourbon there with her back turned, tossing down jiggers of Old Crow and Early Times when she went to get a pack of cigarettes from one of the cartons of Camels kept there on the shelf. My father drank his bourbon from the same jigger glass, t
wo every morning before he brushed his teeth. He told me once that there was a time when he drank a fifth of Old Crow a day and still practiced law, still argued his cases in court, wrote briefs and letters and legal opinions. I can remember how proud I was that he could accomplish such a feat. All of my life, my father did amazing things and the fact that he might become an accomplished alcoholic came as no surprise to me. His drinking was a part of his daily routine and attracted no notice from me. My mother’s drinking was another thing. I suppose I resented as much as anything the fact that she did not handle herself as well as he did . . . as though they might be in some competition between them for who might out-drink whom. In the end she won . . . or perhaps he did because she’s dead and he still drinks. For a while he quit. His drinking had triggered some peculiar malady that caused him to lose half a day at a time. He drove a great deal through the state, trying legal cases in obscure Kentucky towns, and every time he lost one, he would buy a pint of bourbon. One night he drove his car into a muddy field in the rain and a carload of teenaged boys found him standing amid the furrows, the rain beating down on his head. He never knew why he had gone there or what he had done in the hours before and after he was found. He had a gasoline receipt from a filling station in the town nearby. He had driven a hundred miles on that tank of gas and at the end of it, he was standing in the field, his car parked at a jaunty angle near the road. It bothered him to lose that day and he curbed his drinking for a while. The doctor prescribed a medication which would make him sick if he drank and after a time, he drank again anyway. My mother never lost any time at all. She stood at the pantry shelf to drink and she lay on the couch when she was done. She seldom drove anywhere and never in the rain. There were no fields for her to find and no carloads of people coming after her to save her from the wind, to rescue her out of the dark rows where she stood. Whatever journey she took, she went by herself and in the course of her drinking, she never remarked about lost days, or hours which she could not identify, nor time that she could not find. Her intention, I think, was to give time away while his was to escape it and both of them ended up in front of the same pantry shelf.